


All the Way Down

by coldhope



Series: Seemann [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Drowning, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Potentially Resolved Sexual Tension, also with audio files, now with illustrations, time to change the tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-01
Updated: 2012-03-08
Packaged: 2017-10-31 22:51:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 15,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/349214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Equius Zahhak is a disgusting snobbish hoofbeast fetishist with a serious sweating problem but fuck if you are going to watch the idiot straight-up drown right in front of you. It's a seadweller thing. If you are going to watch someone drown you damn well need to be the person who instigated it in the first place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. it's the bitter root, it's twisted inside

**Author's Note:**

> slowly getting the hang of the span tags. This is in response to a prompt at the kinkmeme: Eridan saves Equius from drowning.
> 
>  
> 
> [First couple paragraphs, read out loud.](http://ceruleancynic.tumblr.com/post/19221068014/here-you-go-internet-something-you-did-not-ask)

Oh for fuck's sake.

You have seen landdwellers look like that before, that combination of incompetence and desperation, just before they get themselves in real trouble, and you cannot be having with this shit just at this precise moment. 

He's been doing something unknowable and obviously idiotic with his stupid robots and you could have told him that a boat like that would capsize in the slightest chop and yeah, unsurprisingly as he's tapping in commands to whatever robot he's testing out the wind, which is frisky, catches his stupid fucking dinghy at the wrong angle and splosh, out goes one gigantic troll and fuck knows how much work and equipment.

You watch, disgusted, from your vantage point a little way along the rocky shore. 

He doesn't surface. You wonder, fuck, can the asshole even swim? And even as you're thinking it you're taking off your cape and your perfectly tailored jacket and your scarf and you are trotting down to the rocks by where his moron boat flipped over. No sign of him, and he's big enough to be unmistakable. You say a few more particularly pointed things and bend down to put your face in the water, a turbulent bubble-glittering green-grey fog, but yes: you can see him. He is sinking.

Equius Zahhak is a disgusting snobbish hoofbeast fetishist with a serious sweating problem but fuck if you are going to watch the idiot straight-up drown right in front of you. It's a seadweller thing. If you are going to watch someone drown you damn well need to be the person who instigated it in the first place.

You roll your eyes so hard your whole head moves, and you make a mental note to charge him for the price of replacing this outfit which is never ever going to be the same, and you slide into the water after him. It takes you very little time to swim down and grab Equius, but the big troll's eyes are half-closed and glazed under the water and only tiny bubbles are coming from his nose or mouth. _Goddamnit_ , you think, and exert yourself to haul the limp form out of the water. You are stronger than you look: Fef is stronger even than you, and could probably knock Equius out with a delicate punch to the jaw, but you have no trouble hauling the limp body up and onto the rocks and dump him on his back.

_Fuckin useless musclehead twerp, can't even swim like any decent wriggler would be able to, let's see if you got enough brain cells left to make it worth tryin to get your ass back to breathing._

You rest your ear against the big troll's chest and are rewarded with a little fluttering anxious beat: good, not dead yet. It's more annoying hauling people back from all the way dead, and it takes longer. You push back your revulsion and tip Equius's head back, your fingers tangled in the heavy wet fall of his hair, and breathe for him: a deep long breath, and another, and another. The pulse steadies a little, but isn't getting any deeper; you try another few powerful breaths, and then are almost bucked off as Equius convulses, starts to cough, water dribbling from his mouth, and then doubles up in a terrible STRONG fit of retching. 

You haul him over to lie on his side and watch without love, scooping his sodden hair out of the way. It's thick, heavy, clings to your fingers like seaweed. This is how it goes; they have to get the water out, and choking and coughing that hard almost always makes them puke, and that helps to clear the lungs through the sheer force of the muscular contractions. After a moment or two of miserable watching you help Equius steady himself with a hand on his shoulder, and when you think the hurling is over you reach for your own discarded and very precious cape, and drape it around Equius's shoulders. Shivers run through him like long comber-waves running up to a shore.

"You're okay," you tell the bigger troll, crossly. "I know you feel like thirteen kinds a shit right now but you're gonna be okay. Just breathe."

Equius's coughing slowly dies back to the point where he can manage to speak between coughs. He doesn't sound great, though, there's a lot of wheezing. "I......Ampora?"

"Yeah, it's me. You can feel free to play landdweller versus seadweller later, okay? Just...fuck, you're gonna freeze. Let's get you out of the wind. Anyone know you're out here, waitin for you to get back?" He blinks. "I mean anyone you're workin with?"

Wrong thing to say. Equius's face seems to collapse somehow, all the strength leaving the lines of brow and nose and chin. You guess he's alone, maybe catgirl doesn't like playing on boats. "—Yeah never mind, okay, I got you. Here. Which side hurts worse?"

"M-my left side," Equius manages, trying not to cough.

He wasn't down there very long and you don't think there's gonna be permanent damage, but still, you know it hurts like fuck to breathe at this point. "Okay. Gonna support you on that side but seriously, you want to cough this shit up now as much as you can. Won't do any good to keep that inside you."

Equius flushes deep blue and tries to turn away. Obviously the coughing embarrasses him; sure, it's a sign of weakness, loss of control. You sigh and get your arm properly around him, angry at everything. It shows in your voice. "Listen, Zahhak, I'm a fuckin seadweller. Sorry. Language. A frickin seadweller. I know drowning, okay? I know how this goes. You want to get all the crap out of your lungs you can possibly get. It's okay."

"Ampora....I...my caste status is..."

You abandon bowdlerism. It never suited you. "Oh for fuck's sake quit that shit. Yeah, I'm a sea troll, you're a blueblood, our people been feudin for generations, all that happy guano, but you see anyone around here looks like they give a fuck? You'll be back home safe soon with your happy hemospectrum buddies and all this will be a big bad dream, so shut up and let me fuckin help you." 

He twists a little to stare at you and you wish your hair didn't look like ass, all wet and draggled and sticking to your forehead. You'd spent half an hour on that shit not so very long ago, and diving in after Zahhak has not helped; you don't acknowledge his staring, just hauling one of his gigantic arms round your neck and levering him to his feet. He's still trying not to cough, his chest spasming, cheeks flushed miserably deep blue.

You've hauled him into your cave out of the biting wind, at least, but you can hear the stuff in his lungs bubbling and squeaking as he breathes, and he has that anxious helpless look of a person who isn't getting enough air. You guide him to the wretched excuse for a pallet. You never use this place except when you go hunting, these days, and it's never been too luxurious. "Lie down on your stomach, lean your shoulders over the side. No, shut up. Don't even talk. Do as I say."

With an unhappy little noise he obeys, coughing a little as the position shifts the stuff in his lungs. Good. It's moving. You sit down behind him on the pallet and you begin to rhythmically thump his back and sides with the edges of your hands, moving from the bottom up, loosening whatever the ocean left inside him. He tries to protest but you shoosh him with a glare worthy of Fef and he droops down to hang over the edge of the pallet—and then suddenly, satisfyingly, he is coughing again, obviously involuntarily, loudly and productively. You pause long enough to hand him a handkerchief before going back to your work. 

He is hoarse and very sore by the time you are done, but when you listen to his chest there is none of that unpleasant bubblesqueak wheeze, and he looks less anxious and restless than he had, just pale-blue and exhausted, deep shadows under his eyes. You get him settled half-sitting-up against the wall and you go to build a fire and find your goddamn palmhusk to get his moirail out here and take over the job. 

** \-- caligulasAquarium (CA) began trolling arsenicCatnip (AC)! --

CA: nep you there  
CA: nepeta seriously this is important   
CA: its your goddamn moirail come on answwer   
arsenicCatnip is not available   
CA: fuuuuck  
\--caligulasAquarium (CA) began trolling carcinoGeneticist (CG)! --  
CA: kar get nepeta on the line  
CA: its zahhak he fuckin almost drowwned  
CA: kar  
CA: seriously wwhat the fuck is this ignore ampora day or somefin  
carcinoGeneticist is not available  
CA: FUCK  
CA: IS ANYONE FUCKIN ONLINE WWHAT THE FUCK  
CA:....ok maybe wwinter storms knockin out internet or some shit  
\-- caligulasAquarium (CA) began trolling gallowsCalibrator (GC)! --  
  
CA: pyrope are you there  
CA: pyrope  
CA: this isnt some creepy hittin on you kind a deal are you there i need you  
CA: fuck  
CA: wwinds pickin up again  
CA: fuck  
\-- caligulasAquarium (CA) began trolling cuttlefishCuller (CC)! --  
CA: fef  
CA: fef are you there  
CA: fef this is serious i cant raise anybody on the fuckin mainland  
CA: kar is not answwerin neither is terezi  
CA: fef i need help  
CA: its equius  
CA: kinda maybe savved his gross life or somefin noww i need help  
CA: fuuuuuuuck  
\--caligulasAquarium (CA) has signed off! --


	2. it's the heart you used to have when it died

Your name is Eridan Ampora and you are way, way out of your league dealing with this shit.

You’d hauled the blueblood scum out of the damn ocean and thumped the water out of him and done what anyone would do, tried to contact the vanishingly few people on the skin of this world who gave a dribbling shit what happened to him and guess what, life fucking hates you, as usual, because you cannot even get a line in to Feferi and you know you have the best of what counts for mobile connectivity with her. Unless she’s done some passive-aggressive shit with blocking you and she wouldn’t do that.

She wouldn’t, is all. Fuck.

Point is that the darkseason storms are, like, _here_ , which is why you can’t contact anyone. You’re on a pretty desolate spit of land and you have to wonder, really, Zahhak, did you come here for reasons or was it just that you didn’t want anyone to see you failing horribly at whatever shit your robots were supposed to do now? You’re only here because you were hunting a particular creature and it used to hang around these parts back when you and Fef were a thing and it was kind of like you wished maybe if you got to hunt back in these parts it would be like she was still with you, just for a little bit, and fuck. Fuckin glubtastic fuck you are not up for feelings jams right now.

Problem is, you got a landdweller on your hands, one who is not in any shape to stand the storms that you know are on their way, one who can’t swim worth shit and despite all his bulk is pretty goddamn pathetic when it comes to anything other than building gross sex robots and _fuckdammit the fish puns need to stop_ sweating like a porkbeast.

He got here the dumbass old-fashioned way, by presumably praying to whatever versions of Gl’bgolyb meathead morons worship and paddling a _sailing dinghy_ out from the mainland on the rising tide. You guess if he had the luck of a retarded wriggler he could have made it from the seaport out here before the storms started strifing, but seriously did he think he could do whatever fucking scientific bot shit he had planned when the waves were whipping cream from each crest and throwing his stupid boatlet around like a leaf in the wind?

Yeah, obviously he did. You kind of find it adorable in a pathetic kind of way. Dipshit has no idea how to deal with the sea, no clue at all.

Still, problem remains: you have a pretty sick landdweller huddled in the corner of a shitty non-insulated cave that is gonna be ankle-deep in water when the tide comes in, with three or four days of straight storms on the way. You try to think, what could be worse than this? Oh, right. Sollux Captor could be the motherfucker whining for your help.

Zahhak is disgusting but at least he is not, and never has been, going for Feferi.

You stab at your palmhusk with vicious point-tipped fingers and it tells you just the same shit it has told you for the past hour. Storms going to get worse: best thing to do is stay indoors if you can and if you can’t manage that get to shelter as soon as possible. Abscond.

“Zahhak,” you say. “Wake up. We gotta get out a here.”

He stirs, shivering, and opens his eyes. “....Ampora?”

“Yeah. Can we not do the whole _where am I_ shit again? Got to get your ass out of here, tide’s rising and we got more storm shit on the way. That boat of yours, the one you fell out of like a spastic wriggler, it got a centerboard?”

He lifts his hand to his face as if it weighs tons, rubs at his eyesockets. “I...I believe so. It was that or a vessel with a fixed keel and I required to launch it from shallow water.” He coughs, deep and painful. You ignore it.

“Right, kay. Centerboard is good. We like centerboards. Shit makes this easier. I’m gonna have to dump your ass in that boat and haul you off to what passes for my hive, Zahhak, and you are not going to give me shit about any aspect of this operation or I will fuckin leave you here to freeze and/or drown, we clear?”

Equius is sitting hunched over with his hands pressed to his chest, hair falling in a curtain over his face, but he stiffens when you mention leaving him, and straightens a very little. “.....I understand,” he says, after a moment. You can tell it hurt.

“Fuckin A,” you tell him, and you go to haul his pathetic excuse for a boat in far enough to load the both of you. It isn’t far from this islet to your hive, an ancient shipwreck you’ve been working on for the past however many sweeps, your lair, your home. The idea of bringing Zahhak into your inner sanctum is as disgusting as any goddamn idea can be but the other issue is you have _nowhere else to put him_. And it’s a slippery slope. You step in to help some asshole even a little bit and then you can’t stop and just walk the fuck away, you can’t give up and say to him you’re on your own now, you can’t just...abandon him.

Abandonment is not okay with you. For reasons.

It is a truly shitty boat. You are unsurprised at this and yet you let yourself go on about how truly shitty a boat it is even as you help your musclebound douchebag guest to settle his ballast amidships. It is the shittiest of boats but hey, it does have a centerboard, and the sail is strong enough and the shrouds are okay and you know you can get the two of you to your hive in this piece of shit. You tell him to shut up, and a little later you kind of regret this when you realize he is trying really _really_ hard not to cough. It’s one of those stupid fucking things where dignity trumps all and you decide you didn’t notice it, busying yourself with the rudder, and let the howl of the storm snatch away the noise he’s embarrassed to be making.

Fortunately for everybody the journey doesn't take long, and you stand up in the heaving bow of the dinghy and throw a line over one of the deckside railings. Equius is quiet, curled in on himself, a vast weight tilting the boat, and you haul yourself in hand over hand until you can make fast against the side of your hive. “Wakey-wakey,” you say. “We’re home. You gonna be able to haul yourself out of there or should I fetch a rope?”

Equius’ eyes crack open and you realize they are ultramarine like his blood, the color seeping into the grey irises like ink into damp paper. They are too bright and there are violet-blue bruised shadows beneath them, those eyes. You can see him fighting for control and again for no reason something hurts in your chest. “--I can manage, seadweller,” he croaks, and “seadweller” doesn’t sound like an insult the way it normally does, it has much more an overtone of “highblood.” You just get out of the way and watch as he _makes_ himself get to his feet and haul himself over the teak railing; and then you think fuck it and reach out to steady his elbow as he sways. “Welcome to the _Dualscar_ , Zahhak. My excuse for a humble home. No, shut up. Seriously shut up. You’re freezing.”

He is: he’s shivering in helpless violent teeth-chattering waves and more than once you’ve seen a flicker of ultramarine on his lips where he’s actually managed to break a tooth. Shit is _fucked up_. He’s still trying not to cough and you give up, honestly, bluebloods and their idiot dignity are _beyond_ you. “-This way.”

You kind of have a spare recuperacoon but the amount of sopor on board is pathetic and...fuck, you are not all about to be woken up by the STRONG flailing of some idiot landdweller who's having bad dreams, and you help him roughly into your own cupe and you dump what sopor there is on board into it with him. “--No, really, I said shut up. I know it’s not good but it’s better’n nothing.”

He looks like he’s going to try and say something but the sopor is already doing its job, you can see those anxious lines beginning to fade from his forehead and the corners of his mouth. You notice that his hair spreads out in a black cloud in the green, not unlike the way Fef’s did, and that realization gets your ass up and out and as far away from Equius Zahhak as your ship-hive allows.

The darkseason storms are bad this year. You were lucky: you got in just in time to batten shit down and huddle under the vicious windsong. The image briefly creeps across your pan of Zahhak curled in the corner of your shitty hide-cave trying to outlast the storms on his own, and your chest hurts violently for a moment. Moron. Idiot waste-of-space landdweller, didn’t even know how to handle a simple sailing dinghy, didn’t bother to wear any kind of lifejacket. As if he was _asking_ to die.

You drop into a chair and look at your thoughts carefully. Zahhak’s whole deal is that he is better than everybody except Makara; what could possibly make him unhappy to the point of suicidal ideation? But you remember the desperate helpless look on his patrician face, you remember the weight of his sodden hair looped in your fingers like wet silk, and you shut your eyes against the memory. He’ll be all up and ready to go be a bigot on land tomorrow and either you’ll tell him how the whole thing with the storms works or you’ll just say here, have fun, here’s your excuse for a boat, and not watch the next time he capsizes.


	3. it's the emptiness, it poisons, it lies

You wake up with the horrorterrors only three times that day, which for you isn’t too shabby while sleeping without sopor. The keening of the wind outside probably helps soothe you, you’ve always loved that noise ever since you were a wiggler. The crashing of waves and the windsong in what’s left of the _Dualscar_ ’s rigging: sounds like home.

( _Fef loved it too, she would sometimes sing to you in that high sweet voice that reminded you of the wind in the shrouds and_ )

No, you think, fuck that and fuck you, fuck everything in the universe to death but you are not gonna think about Fef right now, you’re gonna think about something else instead, such as...

Well, the vast earflapping trunkbeast in the room would do. Or the vast blueblood snob, to put it another way. You get up from your pile of shitty wands, which really is no replacement even for a bad recuperacoon, and go to make some coffee and try to wake up. Ow, shitty-wand-pile sleeping is hard on the back. The sky is, of course, a boiling swirl of purple-green clouds and you can’t make out any hint of either moon, but you figure it’s got to be somewhere around sunset.

You’re wearing your purple-and-black striped dressing gown, the one with EA embroidered on the pocket, and you catch sight of yourself in one of the many mirrors as you wait for the coffee to brew. Heh. Your hair’s all tousled and still has salt in it from yesterday and it flops over your face in black-and-purple elflocks, and that plus the louche effect of the robe is actually pretty good. You think maybe you’ll explore that aesthetic a little further when you have some time to spend on something like considering your wardrobe: you make a hell of a handsome romantic junkie poet. You’ve been meaning to move on from the cape-and-scarf thing for a little while now. Good while it lasted, but that shit is also kind of dated, plus it has memories attached to it which you...

Goddamnit.

Okay, so you’re thinking about your horrible houseguest instead as you burn your tongue on your coffee and say a number of words Equius would no doubt consider improper. What do you even _know_ about him, other than the obvious (he’s a raving snob, he has no fashion sense, he’s gross as fuck, he hangs out with the damn catgirl all the time and makes creepy robots which you don’t want to know what he does with them, he has a thing for centaurs, he has a broken horn, he wears cracked shades for some reason)? You’re a snob too, of course, but that’s because you’re basically royalty and also fuck landdwellers, the whole gill-less warmblooded mess of them. All he has going for him is his ultramarine blood, which isn’t as uncommon or wonderful as he seems to think it is, and he’s built this vast superiority complex on that one point.

Which, okay, that’s neurotic as hell but one thing you have learned over the sweeps is that pretty much everyone you know is fucked in the head in one way or another. Serket’s a psychopath, Pyrope licks people, Vantas is....well, Vantas, Makara’s straight-up shithive maggots and also basically lives on sopor slime, the list goes on. You do not even exempt yourself from this, because you are fucked in the head your ownself and you know it, but you would fight anyone who said it out loud nonetheless.

So where does Zahhak get his whole societally superior schtick from? Presumably his lusus trained him in the finer points of looking down his nose at people and being supercilious, because you are betting that’s not a thing he hatched with. And the whole STRENGTH bit, that’s gotta be a mutation or something because...

Wait, what? You stare into your coffee cup and you chase down the tail of that thought. He’s a blueblood, which is not in itself uncommon, but how long has the STRENGTH been a part of the blueblood genetic makeup or whatever that shit calls itself? You are pretty sure you have met other bluebloods who didn’t a) sweat like that or b) accidentally crush things by touching them. So Zahhak is _special_.

You wonder whether that’s actually the root of the _inferiority_ complex theory: he’s such an asshat all the time because he’s secretly all _bluh bluh i am not a perfect pure example of b100ness_. It’s not really a theory that grabs you but you tuck it away for further perusal nonetheless. 

Without really expecting the internet to work, you settle at your desk and see if anyone’s online. Nope; you can’t reach the mainland to either ask them about blueblood mutations or discuss your theories on what is wrong in the head of Equius Zahhak, or for that matter what the hell you are supposed to do with Equius Zahhak now that he is in your shiphive. Dammit, you aren’t good at not being able to talk to people. Even if they don’t actually, like, _respond_ to your online nattering, the idea of not being entirely alone is appealing.

The ship creaks in a particularly vicious gust of wind and as the howl dies away you can hear him hacking up a lung: great, he’s awake. With a sigh you heave yourself out of the chair and go to see what’s kicking in the Land of Giant Weirdos.

He’s rested his elbows on the rim of the cupe and is leaning on them, sopor-slick hair hiding his face and dripping green down the side. He’s stopped coughing by the time you get there, but his shoulders heave with the effort of getting his breath back.

“Sleep well?” you inquire. He jerks and looks up at you so suddenly that his hair flings a drop of sopor on your dressing-gown. Great.

“Ampora,” he says, and his voice sounds deeper and more gravelly than usual. “I believe I owe you my life.”

You blink at him. “Man, you don’t waste time, do you. Yeah, I saved your life, don’t get all emotional with me about it.”

“I am not getting all emotional,” he says, proving that he is incapable of recognizing sarcasm when it comes right up and does a little dance for him. “I am the farthest thing from emotional. I have never been emotional.”

You notice that his eyes are very, very bright, and that his face is paler than usual save for a deep blue flush high on each cheekbone. “I believe it is customary to thank one’s rescuer having been rescued, so: you have my thanks. Now, if you would be so good, kindly point me in the direction of the mainland and I will take my leave.”

“You actually just said that, didn’t you,” you wonder aloud. “Jesus fuck, Zahhak, nobody is going _anywhere_ until these storms die down, and you’re in no condition to be handling that dinghy even if you knew what the fuck you were doing with it, which you don’t. I tried to contact some of the others but the storms are knocking out the wireless.”

“Nonetheless,” Equius rumbles, “I will be going. Thank you for your hospitality.” You watch as he braces himself on the edge of the recuperacoon and makes an actual attempt at hauling himself out of it. He makes it about halfway before another fit of coughing shakes him and he loses his grip and slithers back into the slime.

You sigh. Okay, so you can add _stubborn as a mulebeast_ to your list of mental attributes for this guy. He leans on the edge and coughs himself bright blue in the face; when you reach out to steady him he’s fever-hot under your hand. You sigh _again_ with a great deal more feeling behind it. Goddamn everything, now you’re going to be stuck with him for days and _days_.

When he can breathe again he just rests his face on his folded arms, not looking at you, and murmurs something. You lean in.

“...should have left me there,” he’s saying, to himself.

You have to admit that you've begun to realize Equius Zahhak is fucked up in _so many_ more ways than you had hitherto conceived.


	4. it's everything that you'll never find

“What in the glubfucking hell is _that_ supposed to mean?”

You stare at him. Equius stiffens a little, hunching over, but doesn’t raise his head to meet your gaze. “Nothing,” he says after a moment.

“No, I distinctly heard you say something, Zahhak, along the lines of how I shoulda left your ass where I found it, and that strikes me as not only super illogical but also fucked up on a number of levels, what did you _mean_.” You cannot even believe this.

You have to get in real close even to hear what he says next, and you wish you hadn’t. “...It would have been...convenient.”

“What would? You falling out of your stupid excuse for a boat like a panrotted moron and drowning? Yeah, I can totes see that, on account a _what the fuck_. Are you even listening to yourself?”

He rumbles something. “What was that?”

“....don’t suppose you would be so kind as to moderate your language...”

That makes you feel better, oddly, although you’re still hopping mad at this ungrateful mess. “Fuck no I would not. I want you to quit screwin around and explain to me just what the fuck you were doin out there in the first place. --Hold that thought, however. If I’m gonna listen to your shit and not flip out I need more goddamn coffee. You want some?”

Now he _does_ look up, big shadowed dark-blue eyes honestly surprised under all the fever-haze. You roll your own eyes at him. “What? Or tea. I guess I got tea somewhere, it’s good for people who’re sick, I read that shit someplace.”

For a moment he looks _tired_ , worn down, and you wonder again what the hell happened to bring Mr. I’m Better Than You Also Horse Puns to such a state. “I...” he begins, and then just shakes his head slightly. “Thank you. I would like some tea.”

“Right,” you say. Jesus, everything has to be such a damn production around here. At least he’s talking, a little bit, that’s better than muttering dire bullshit under his breath, and you have exactly nothing better to do than listen to him telling you whatever crazy shit is going on.

You realize as you swish out of the room with your dressing-gown belling out all regal-like that you haven’t thought about Feferi Peixes for something nearly approaching half an hour. That has got to be a record.

~

A little later, you’re sitting on a hastily hauled-over chair beside the recuperacoon (no, lounging, possibly sprawled elegantly, that’s better) and watching him turn a chipped purple mug between his hands and work out what he wants to say. Or what he doesn’t want to say least. Your purple forelock is messily covering your left eye and you think you can work with that.

(You did have tea, it turned out, somewhat stale but still viable, in a canister with adorable cuttlefish on it, and that was something you could have done without but _whatever_ , more important shit to think about than cuttlefish even if they do threaten to shred the barely-scarred-over mess that is your heart into thousands of tiny bits and oh, fuck, Ampora, really, now you’re even fucking boring _yourself_ with this shit.)

“This is intensely embarrassing,” he says, eventually. You manage not to interject a _really?_ and just watch. His face looks a lot different without the shades. “However, given the fact that there is nothing about my current situation which can be described as anything other than embarrassing, perhaps the damage has been done. I was out on the sea in direct contravention of an order by the Highblood.”

“Makara?” you say. “The fuck would he be giving you orders regarding maritime pursuits for?”

He hunches over the mug. “I asked him to.”

Oh, now you’re cooking with seacoal. “Run that by me again?”

“I asked him to.” The voice is grating, measured. You can tell this is nastier for him than having the seawater pounded out of his lungs, and all at once you feel like an asshole. More of one than usual. “It is so rare that one of higher station than myself deigns to give me a command that I have been...reduced...to asking for it as a favor. You may now laugh, Ampora. Dissolve in fits of mirth.”

“Pff, you can’t tell _me_ what to do,” you say, and sigh. “Fuck, Zahhak, I think I get it. I think I really do. You’re so wound up in all this classist bloodist shit that it’s worked its way into your own thinkpan and now you’re like, inverse-inferior-superior double mobius reacharound fucked in the head. You often have to ask Makara to boss you around?”

He hunches further and you can see him making an effort not to turn the mug in his hands into fine porcelain fragments, which you appreciate. “From time to time.”

“Why the ocean, though? What’s the angle there?”

He coughs. “I am...not entirely sure. I believe it was based on instructions given by his lusus, who was as I recall a sea-goat. The Highblood is not...as experienced in commanding underlings as one might expect from one of his station.”

You really try not to laugh, and slurp coffee instead. Okay, that’s adorable. Poor bloody Equius having to beg the damn psychoclown indigo to boss him around, and sopor-stupid Makara being at a total loss and having to go ferret through what’s left of his memory of being scolded by his own damn lusus. It’s the kind of shit that would make a really, really bad movie. Vantas might even appreciate it. “Okay, I’m followin you. So he tells you to stay away from the water and you get a wild hair a _blood defiance_ goin on and you go seafaring anyway, that about the size a it? Jesus, Zahhak. What are you, four?”

He’s leaning over, breathing in the steam from his tea, and you think _fuck, with hair like that the least he could do is take care of it, those are some gnarly split ends_ and that surprises you enough to make you shut up long enough to hear his answer. “It was not one of my prouder moments. Nevertheless I had a reason to go out on the water. I was testing a prototype.”

“You couldn’t do that in some nice safe freshwater lake or something when there wasn’t a week’s worth a storms on the horizon? No, forget it, shut up Ampora, go on. I wanna hear this.”

He flicks a quick glance at you from behind the curtain of hair. “It seemed...at the time like an excellent idea. I admit I was perhaps not thinking very clearly.”

“What happened?” you ask, and you don’t hear a sneer in your own voice.

“I had received some...bad news of a personal nature.” Equius coughs. “Of a somewhat devastating personal nature. And it seemed like an ideal time to clear my head with a brisk sailing trip to analyze the performance of my latest innovation. And...”

And get his sad jollies off by defying Makara’s pathetic excuse for an order. You don’t make him finish the sentence. “Okay. I see. Not like we haven’t all done dumb shit when we’re upset...”

He makes a face as if he’s trying to eat a lemon whole and cuts you off, saying, very quickly, staring into his empty mug, “Miss Megido has rejected my overtures of romantic affection and Miss Leijon has taken Karkat Vantas as her matesprit.”

You stare at him. Silence fills up the room like dark water, broken only by the wind outside and the faint wheeze of Zahhak’s breathing. “Oh,” you say, very quietly, and when he starts to cough again you get up and take the mug away and you steady him, the heat of his fever warming your fingers. You don’t take the hand away immediately when he gets control again.

You know he’s been Nepeta’s moirail forever and ever and that they’ve always been...kind of...well, focused on each other, like she doesn’t really have anyone else who hangs out with her except him and nobody except her _wants_ to hang out with him, and. It’s a little tough to believe that he actually lowered himself to the point of asking Aradia to be in any quadrant with him on account of she’s scraping the bottom of the hemospectrum, but if he did, that must have been every bit as hard as telling _your_ seadwelling ass about any of this. You’re used to rejection, you get it all the time, it’s like your thing cause the universe hates you, but you don’t really picture this guy being shot down and taking it with equanimity. In fact you picture him kind of flipping right the fuck off the handle.

 _Sigh_.

“Listen. You are one sick landdweller, Equius. I am gonna take advantage a the fact that even though we’re warring castes and all that shit, I _do_ technically outrank you, and therefore I am going to directly order the fuck out a you to lie back down and get some rest. You may feel free to be as outraged as you like over this once you’re not burning up.”

The look he gives you from under the hair is unreadable at first and then you go cold all over as you recognize it to be gratitude. You take your hand away, and it feels as if his warmth is slow to fade from your skin.

“As you wish, Ampora,” he says. You nod decisively and look at him for another long uncertain moment before absconding out of there to do some serious reflection.


	5. it might as well, it might as well hurt

He sleeps most of the rest of the night, waking occasionally for you to pour tea into him, he must be dehydrated as all hell what with running a fever and so on. You don’t speak much when you interact with him. You aren’t sure if this is for your sake or his.

At one point you take a very long bath, lying under the water in your ablution block and feeling it pulse through your gills in a steady, calming rhythm. You eventually bestir yourself to wash your hair and scrub yourself properly clean, and then you spend half an hour fussing with the hair in front of the mirror. If you gel it straight back when it’s still wet and let it dry like that and comb it out, it goes straight, and if you part it just here you can get a kind of purple-black gradient fade waterfall effect going on over one eye, which you think is kind of awesome. Also, you can tuck the ends behind your fins like this, which gives you the opportunity to shake your head ever so slightly and let the hair fall in a graceful sweep across your face. Fucking dramatic, right there. All you need is a curtain blowing behind you and maybe a rose falling in slo-mo into water and you are everybody’s goddamn tragic heartthrob.

You have dark circles under your eyes, but you have had those for a while and you don’t really feel like they detract from the effect. When you dress you put on a floppy shirt that may or may not have its roots in your FLARPing days with Vriska--Orphaner Dualscar totally wore floppy gamblignant shirts and you will fight any motherfucker who disagrees--and after a little thought you add a fine golden chain around your throat. You put your rings on, one by one, circlets of deep tawny gold set with purple gems the color of your blood, and you feel so very much more _yourself_ when you have those semi-precious knuckledusters on.

Zahhak is asleep when you look in on him, and you take the opportunity to go get dinner started. Most of the time you don’t bother with much, you live on coffee and shitty junk food, but the guy in your spare room is probably not gonna benefit from a diet of chemical-orange items with their names spelled wrong for legal reasons. You used to like to cook, every now and then, and Fef would help, she’d chop things or stir them and you’d invariably end up mid-snuggle to realize that in fact neither of you had turned the goddamn exothermic preparation hull on, and there would be a lot more snuggling and dinner would get put off for another hour or two.

You make yourself follow this memory, like pulling out a splinter. It hurts less than you’d expected. In hindsight you kind of should have seen the break coming, maybe, but nothing could really compare to that moment when you realized your ass had been fucking _dumped_ like a heap of day-old chum and the bottom fell right the hell out of your world. In fact, no, you make yourself remember that, as you watch the pot bubble and seethe on the burner. You _make_ yourself remember it.

She’d always been with you. Since you were little. You were _made_ for one another, you fit so beautifully together, you hunted to feed her lusus, she kept the world alive. You were moirails with the most astonishing and beautiful creature ever to have hatched on Alternia, the Heiress to the Empire, the tyrian-blooded woman who held all your fates in her lovely palm and

one day

she had said to you: let’s just be friends.

You went over and over and over in your memories: what had you said, what had you done, what hadn’t you said or done that you should have, what had made her suddenly change and reject you when for so long all you had ever wanted was to see yourself reflected in those astonishing eyes and know that you were worth everything you thought you were.

(This might, looking back on it, have been an indication of your own emotional instability.)

When she’d dropped you you were frantic, trying everything to get her back, flailing like a gaffed pike and making even more of an ass of yourself than usual. You had been drowning in misery, the sheer painful sickness in your chest crushing you hard enough to make breathing almost impossible; you’d gone into the water to try and help that ache, but even swimming hadn’t eased it. You felt as if something was closing its fist inside your chest, just at the end of your breastbone, and it wrenched purple tears out of you in great ungraceful gagging whoops, you found yourself at the last curled up in on yourself in some sea-cave hugging your bony knees to your chest and weeping purple into the cold water around you. Nothing could ever be the same. You didn’t want it to.

You didn’t want to surface, either, but you did, a day later, shaking with the cold of the deeps and as unhappy as you could remember being, and the first thing you did was sign on to Trollian and try to contact her even though it felt like you were sticking her damn trident into your middle and twisting, and she refused to answer you. The others wouldn’t either. She must have told them about what happened and now none of them wanted anything to do with your pathetic ass either.

That morning you ended up on the deck of the _Dualscar_ , drunk as fuck and miserable as more fuck, and the sunburn you got left you confined to your recuperacoon for several days. By the time you could bear clothing again some of the worst of the raw despair had passed, but you couldn’t stop seeing reminders of her all over your hive, things she’d left there, things that brought back your memories of how she’d once been with you, and you sank into bitterness from the heart up and you turned into a real high-toned grade-A bitch. That had lasted perigees, and you are only now getting to the point where you can recognize yourself as a real bitch, and know why, and God but you wish you’d never seen Zahhak yesterday, wished you’d never had to have that conversation with him, but...

But if you hadn’t seen him yesterday he probably would be dead, and while you do get that, you do, believe you you get that shit, how _nice_ it would be to just fall into death and never wake up again, you know that he unlike you has at least one goddamn person who cares about him, even if she’s got a brand new shiny-ass matesprit to have sloppy makeouts with. You know Leijon does care for him and you do not really want to think about what she’d do to you if you had _not_ stepped in to haul his ass back to shore.

You want to cry again, briefly, angrily, because the world is unfair and miserable and nobody understands. 

But you have dinner to make and as you turn down the flame under your pot of seafood stew you can feel that weight of boring old rationality descend on your shoulders once more, like another cape, one that’s a much less interesting color.

~

Life would be easier, you think, if your _fucking_ generator could stay functional for more than two nights at a stretch. When the lights go out you wait the requisite forty seconds for them to go back on before taking the pot off the heat and going to find your oilskins and a wrench. Fucking fuck-awful goddamn pieces of landdweller shit. Something’s got stuck in one of the intakes again and it takes you a good ten minutes of prodding and prying, shoulders hunched against the driving wind and rain and seaspray, before the goddamn thing splutters to life again and the lights of your hive flicker and brighten once again. You’d been meaning to get a replacement for it but events beyond your control had transpired, including Zahhak, and you just hope to Gl’bgolyb that the thing doesn’t conk out entirely while you got a sick landdweller on your hands. Shit gets cold out here with no heat units running.

Still, once the thing is working again it seems to be content to go on working, and you make your way back inside, dripping and shivering all over, and go to fix your hair before you have to see company. The hood mostly saved it from getting totally ruined but you still have to straighten out a couple tendrils here and there, and you glower at yourself in the mirror.

Hey. Pretty goddamn good glower right there.

That cheers you up a little, and when you go to see if he’s awake and in the mood for dinner you’re almost smiling.

~

You’re kind of pleased by the appetite with which he engulfs your pretty basic stew. It’s not even all that spicy, you’d gone easy on the pepper on account of how you remember when you’d been sick Fef had made mild things for you that were tasty but not burning. He eats with the singleminded purpose of someone who does this as refuelling rather than enjoying something, but he seems to be having a good time so you don’t say much. You can also tell he’s made some kind of an effort to fingercomb his hair, it’s no longer matted together with sopor-slime, and you have to admit, yeah, it _is_ good hair. Now if he’d only do something with it other than using it as a tactical face-concealment device. (Your own hair is totally doing that right now but that’s ironic, so it’s okay.)

“Why are you doing this?” he asks, just as he finishes his bowl. It’s kind of a surprise that he’s taken this long to come out with the question.

“Feeding you? Cause I don’t really want a dead landdweller in my hive, shit’s kind a hard to explain when people come askin questions.”

Equius looks at you and you can’t help feeling scolded. Which makes you annoyed. “Okay, okay. I’m....I guess I’m doing this cause it needs to be done and no one else was around to save your ass. That good enough?”

“You hate me,” he points out.

“Yeah, but I hate most people, and anyway, that’s like, that’s....okay, Zahhak, I don’t expect you to get this but we seadwellers have this thing about drowning people...”

“That’s not what I meant,” he says. His voice is slightly wavery; you can tell his fever’s risen. “Why are you...being _nice_ to me?”

Every single stickleback spike you have, were you the kind of seatroll who actually had spikes, stands up. “I’m sorry, was that not okay? Should I be yelling invective at you? Would that be easier for you to comprehend, cause I’m so inscrutable and alien?”

He stares at you with wide ultramarine eyes that look honestly puzzled, and it makes you feel _terrible_ , and you stand up. “Never mind. Fuck it. It’s nearly dawn, I’m gonna try and get some sleep, you should do the same.”

You don’t even know why you’re so irritated as you grab his empty bowl and your own and stalk out of the spare respiteblock. You really have no idea, and that makes you six times as annoyed, and you clatter the bowls into the sink and pour yourself a stiff drink and stare out into the lightening stormswept sky. What the fuck, Ampora. What the fuck. You were holding it together not so long ago.

Taking your drink out to your own respiteblock, you settle in your chair: it’s more comfortable than a pile of shitty wands, even if it does make you want to try and call up your Trollian chatfriends. As before, the interface is dark.

You stay there for a long time, getting up only to refill your glass, and you don’t even realize it when you slither from unhappy wakefulness into sleep.

~

Hours later, hours after the sun has risen and all the windows in your hive are autodarkened against its light, even filtered through the stormclouds, something wakes you other than your own horrorterrors, and you sit up, knocking over your empty glass. After a moment the sound comes again, and something in it grabs the base of your spine and gets you out of the chair and moving.

He’s thrashing about weakly in the cupe, face twisted, gasping, breath raw and ragged: you didn’t know Zahhak was prey to horrorterrors himself, but it’s probably just the fever giving him terrible dreams, and you stand in the doorway for a moment and then you just are not able to _not_ go over and take his hot face between your hands and shoosh him. It has nothing to do with thoughts, it has nothing to do with feelings, it is straight-up instinct that makes you want to stop the shitty dreams however you can, stop whatever’s going on in his pan that makes him look so utterly miserably _small_.

He calms quickly after you’re there, and you don’t leave, pulling the chair up beside the cupe. Twice more before sunset he half-wakes in horrible hacking fits and you shoosh him again each time, and the second time you can tell his fever is breaking.

When you wake up you’re curled in the chair beside him and your hands are smudged violet with bruises; for a moment they puzzle you, and then you remember how tightly he had clung to your fingers as if they were the only thing between him and the endless howling void. You flex them and hiss, and work the rings off before the bruising can swell up even more; probably none of them are broken. You hope. His grip had been powerful, sick as he was.

Getting up, stiffly, you have a look: he’s sleeping peacefully, hair once again spread out in that black drifting cloud under the surface. Fine. Good. You figure he’ll be up and about shortly and you go to fetch him--heh--a bunch of towels, and leave him to get on with it, feeling old and worn-out and inscrutably guilty.


	6. i went down to rescue you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> now with illustration!

This broken-sleep thing is really fucking with you. You’ve showered quickly and drunk enough coffee to make you trembly and on-edge, and you are finding it real hard not to think about how goddamn weird that had been last morning, how _puzzled_ he had looked, how annoyed with the universe and everything in it that look had made you.

You are also finding it hard not to think about waking multiple times from an uneasy doze and shooshing him while he choked and fought for breath, but that might just be because of your hands, which hurt like motherfuckers and you are no longer certain your left pinky isn’t cracked. You’ve tied it up with a handkerchief which is making things awkward as you take advantage of a brief lull in the stormhowl to fiddle around with your recalcitrant generator. You don’t even really need a whole new one, you just need a new part; this intake filter is cracked right across and the salt builds up on the inside of the airducts and then you are wanking around in the dark until you can clear it out again and start it back up. And you are no mechanic.

(This is why your own launch is still sitting in its davots on the _Dualscar_ ’s deck, strapped down against the wind: the engine hasn’t worked for half a perigee and you have had to fucking _swim_ in order to hunt, which is so far beneath one of your royal station that you cannot even begin to find the level of invective required to convey it.)

You’ve hauled a tarp into a makeshift windbreak around the genny and you have the manifold off and you are scraping salt out of the filters when you hear, beneath you in the ship, the thrumming of water in your ablution trap. So Equius is up.

The thought occurs and is immediately unwelcome that he has no spare clothes and everything he _has_ is drenched in sopor, so what he’s going to wear until you can do some laundry is kind of in the hazy event horizon of _oh fuck_. Oh, _fuck_ , you did not need the image of a naked Equius Zahhak wandering around your goddamn hive. Let’s concentrate on this here intake _real hard_ for a while, Ampora, stop thinking things you should by no means consider.

You tinker with it twitchily for several more minutes, wrapping yet more cable-ties around the cracked section of the intake bell, firing it up at last, but when the sound of water stops and is replaced with deep raspy coughing--Jesus, he sounds like a dweller of the deep when he does that--you sigh and get up, wiping salt and grease from your hands. Which hurt. A lot. Nevertheless you had better seatroll the fuck up and deal with your unnerving houseguest.

In the meal-preparation block you put on a kettle for tea--more coffee would make your stomach churn worse than it already is--and stare at yourself in the reflective surface of a pan. Not too bad. A little disheveled from the work topside, but you look like you have shit together, you’re in charge here, you’re the authority figure. You’re wearing a dark purple dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and your hair is still doing the flopping left-eye thing only now it’s gone all elegantly piece-y with the salt wind.

(You wish for a moment that you had your cape and scarf on. They’re at least familiar, and they act as a kind of pathetic mental armor in some way.)

Something rumbles behind you and you nearly drop the pan, but catch yourself, and set it down quietly only to turn and be faced with the specter of Equius Zahhak in a towel.

Towels, plural. He’s got one wrapped around his waist for decency’s sake _thank fuck_ and his hair is in a turban-wrap of another, and Jesus but you weren’t wrong about the muscles, there’s not a spare gram of fat on this guy anywhere. The body language is all wrong, though, someone who looks like that should be strutting about and flexing to make various bits of muscle lunge out in all directions like belligerent slugs, but Zahhak is just holding on to the doorway with one hand, vast shoulders hunched as if to try and make himself smaller, and you notice that his toes are wiggling nervously.

You could have done without that.

He clears his throat again, that low rumble. “I took the liberty of using your ablution block.”

“No kidding?” You lean back against the sink, bracing yourself on your hands. “Uh. I. I can, uh, wash your clothes for you. That is a thing which I can do.”

 _Fuck_ , you think, that has got to be the lamest thing you have ever said in however many sweeps you have been saying lame things. You can feel your face heating up and you redirect your gaze to the middle distance. Only your hands, which are traitorous bastards, choose this moment to point out that they are bruised to all hell and one finger is likely fractured, and they stop holding you up against the rim of the sink and you catch yourself just before you lose balance, hissing. Another couple of points to Most Lame Interaction Ever. Zahhak frowns at you; with his hair all swept up in its towel-turban you can see all of his face, all the bits of it, and there is certainly fearsomeness in the way his eyebrows draw together, the corners of his patrician mouth turn down.

“Are you all right?” he asks. You are aware you are still blushing purple, fuck everything in the universe.

“I’m fine. You seem to be feeling better; would you like any breakfast?” When in doubt revert to basic social niceties, right?

That only works if the other party is reading the same rulebook. Zahhak lets go of the doorframe and crosses the block to you, and holy shit he really is tall and broad; he towers over you, and the effect is only slightly spoiled by the fact that his voice when he speaks is raspy as hell. “Let me see.”

For a moment you consider refusing, glaring him down, but honestly what would be the point, he’d eventually work it out for himself. Grudgingly you reveal your bruise-smudged hands, the ring and pinky of the left hand strapped together with a now-dirty purple handkerchief.

He touches you and you are astonished to find that while he was capable of doing this damage in the first place he is also capable of a very careful, very light grip. You realize this must be the way he handles his circuitry and robotics; anything harder would crush delicate connections. He turns your hands gently over in his, and hisses between his broken teeth at the bruising. “Did I do this?”

“Yeah. Well, you were kind of out of it at the time and--look, Equius, it’s not your fault, seriously, you were in a real bad place mentally speaking, you didn’t know what you were doing,” you add, because his face has done that weird thing where it seems to collapse suddenly as if all the strength is draining out like water. “It’s _okay_. I’ve had worse hauling on the damn shrouds in a gale before now.”

This is a lie, but he looks so despondent you can’t bear it. And then he does something to your possibly-broken finger that makes you yelp and try to pull away, but he’s holding on steadily and for the second time you feel that iron inside his bones. He could crush you to pieces if he wanted to.

He’s unwrapping your stained handkerchief bandage and examining the little finger, which is now hurting quite a lot. “This is cracked,” he says. “I apologize profoundly, Ampora. Will you let me splint it?”

“You know how to do that?” Shit, that sounded condescending. He just nods.

“I am unfortunately....somewhat prone to casually injuring others by accident or misfortune. The very least I can do to make up for harming someone is to provide first aid for their injury. Have you got any short rigid bits of wood or plastic about so long, no sharp edges? A pen will do if necessary.” He has to let go of you and turn away to cough into his elbow, but he’s all business. “--Excuse me. None of the others are fractured, I’m glad to say.”

You blink at him. Um. Fuck, do you have anything like that? Frogsicle sticks, maybe? Fef loved those goddamn things, she used to keep the sticks, they had little bullshit aphorisms on them you could read once you’d slurped off the last of the cold sweetness. You rummage with your good hand in one of the drawers and come up with a bunch of faded-with-age wooden sticks. “Like this?”

“That would do admirably. And...have you a handkerchief that is...fresher?” He regards the oil-stained rag without love. You almost have to laugh.

“I got tons of them. You wait here.” Without waiting for an answer you step around him and scuttle off to your respite block, where you stare at yourself in a mirror and try to figure out if the purple blush is attractive or seriously embarrassing, and think it is actually kind of both and _why would you even be thinking that_.

Your poker-face is more or less back on when you return to the kitchen to find Zahhak perched politely in a chair, looking as dignified as it is possible to look while clad in a pair of towels and an expression of determination. He rises when you come in and gestures: you sit, and he kneels beside your chair, and you look away and think about anything else, anything at all, Feferi, fucking Sollux fucking Captor, anything except what is going on right now.

It hurts, unavoidably, but it doesn’t hurt as much as you had expected. What’s almost worse is that astonishingly light and careful touch, Equius’s fingertips deftly setting and then immobilizing your finger, wrapping the makeshift bandage in a perfect schoolfeeder-text figure of 8, knotting the ends where they won’t press uncomfortably between fingers. You do glance at him once while he’s working, and you can see the very tip of a blue tongue at the corner of his mouth, everything about him is totally and completely focused on the task at hand, a laserlike attentiveness.

When he’s done, though, all that surety, all that confidence drains right back out of him again and there’s that hunching in on himself you’ve come to dislike. “--Thanks,” you say. “Seriously, that’s like a professional job there. I was...gonna make breakfast if you want any, and how are you feeling anyhow?”

“Vastly improved,” he rumbles, and settles himself back into a chair like a civilized person. “My thanks, Ampora, for your hospitality and your assistance. Believe me, I appreciate it.”

 _That’s not what you said at first_ , you think. You look at him critically: the fever-shine has gone from his eyes, he’s a healthier shade of blue-grey, and his fingers had been hardly warmer than your own. Good enough for you. “‘Tweren’t nothin,” you drawl, feeling as lightheaded as if you were the one running a temperature. “I meant it about laundry, too.”

“That would be most kind. As would breakfast.”

~

You make scrambled eggs because that is what you have the ingredients for. You’d been going to try and make a basic grocery run when all this shit blew up and you are kind of limited in your scope of culinary mastery right now, but Equius doesn’t seem to mind. The silence is almost companionable as you sit at the table (except for when he has to cough, for which he apologizes, which you think is going to get super-annoying super-fast) until the lights go out. Again.

“ _Fuck_. Oh, fuck that piece of shit in its stupid cheapass powerblock. --Sorry about this. Gotta go kick my generator again, it's been cuttin out left and right for nights now.”

“What model?”

You blink in the darkness. Seadwellers have good darkvision: you can see he’s tilted his head, interested, focused.

“It’s a KDY something. Piece of shit. KDY Four Thousand maybe?” You get up and light a candle, sticking it in the middle of the table: wild shadows dance and he suddenly looks like some statue of an ancient godcreature, the candlelight soft on his skin, harsh on the planes and edges of his face and _fucking panrotted fuck_ you need to think about something else now.

“Four thousand sixty three,” he says, and he sounds dead certain. “It’s the intake, right? Intake manifold’s filter array and horn crack lengthwise. It’s a known fault.”

“...Yeah, actually. That’s exactly right. I kind of tied it together with cable-ties but it's not holding together in this kind of weather.”

“It wouldn’t. You have a welding rig on board?”

You stare at Equius in the flickering candlelight. He looks utterly serious. “Yeah, but it’s a piece of shit too...”

“Get me something even remotely more suitable to wear and I’ll fix it. --No, look, Ampora.” He sounds almost pleading. “I broke your d...your danged finger, let me repair your generator. It won’t take long.”

Which is why a short time later you find yourself leaning against the companionway and listening to the fzzt-fizzle-crackle of the welding torch as Equius Zahhak, wearing the biggest and most shapeless purple fuzzy lounging pajamas you own, squares his shoulders against the storm and fixes your goddamn generator.

Somewhere you think: this is the kind of absurd that almost has to be _destined_.


	7. i went all the way down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Almost there, folks. Subsidiary information can be found on my tumblr at http://ceruleancynic.tumblr.com/.
> 
> now illustrated by the wonderful [roachpatrol](http://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol)!

Reliable power has never been an issue until suddenly it was, and then you had to realize the scope of exactly how big a deal it was _not_ to have reliable power. Zahhak had returned from his mission of repair drenched to the skin (more towels) and coughing, but the damn generator is purring like a pouncebeast and you think the lights are brighter than they’ve been in perigees.

With the power running you can actually do laundry, and you do one of those things where you take your mind away and put it on some kind of autopilot while you put Zahhak’s clothes into the washer. You’re the Orphaner Dualscar again, with a violent violet fist you rule the heaving main, you and Ahab’s Crosshairs together are a force unbeatable by anyone _even fucking Mindfang_ because jesus, even in a nightdream you are not going to be bested by that bitch. Being angry at your own nightdream gets you through the difficult bits and you are pretty composed when you return to your dwelling-entertainment block and find him fiddling with your wireless, what the _shit_.

He looks up: he’s pulled back his hair and knotted it with a rubber band or something and while bits of it have already escaped you can see the majority of his face and you can see very clearly where his expression suddenly...falters, what might have been a smile running down like, heh, like a broken generator spinning down, to be replaced with that stoic non-expression you’ve always associated with him. He’s seen your expression of bright hot fury at his presumption, you realize, and all at once you feel very tired, tired almost beyond rest, this is way beyond you and you are wondering how much more complication you can take before you snap and go raving shithive maggots your ownself.

“What are you doing,” you grind out.

“Your wireless communications receiver, it...there’s an easy and rapid way to boost the gain at least thirty percent if you crosspatch the amplification module through to the....” His voice runs down, much as his possible-smile had done.

“Look, Zahhak. I appreciate you fixing that generator and incidentally you must be freezing, you better not have some kind of relapse, but...look, that’s not like a tacit carte blanche to go fucking with the rest of my electronic shit. Okay?”

You can really tell he regrets pulling the hair back because he does that thing where he tips his jaw down just slightly, enough to let the curtain fall over his face and oh right, there’s no curtain, he pulled it back. And there’s that _hunching_ again, that attempt to make himself seem smaller than he is.

Fuck. You rub at your face and drop into a chair. “I just. It’s...my stuff is kind of important to me, is all.”

“No,” he rumbles, “I quite understand, and I apologize. I took an inappropriate liberty. I assure you it will not happen again.”

“Mmh.”

You go on rubbing your face for a while and there’s silence and you expect him to be fidgeting or something but when you do look up again he’s just where you left him, head bowed, shoulders hunched. “Well?” you demand. “Did it work?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The signal boosting whatever. Did it work?”

Again you get treated to the sight of Equius Zahhak looking totally and utterly puzzled, and a part of you chalks up a score on some unknowable blackboard while most of the rest of you thinks you’re a douche.

“I...ah...have not tested it, actually. You came in just as I was about to.”

“Well, get on with it then. It’d be goddamn useful to have a wider range, specially in weather like this.”

You think just as he nods to you and turns back to his work that maybe the edge of that smile might be creeping back.

~

\-- caligulasAquarium began pestering carcinoGeneticist \--!

CA: kar you there?  
CA: kar i dont knoww howw long i got before the connection cuts out again  
CA: but if youre there i need you to listen ok  
CA: equius is wwith me. i mean hes on my ship. fucker did somethin dumb and nearly drowwned, long story. hes ok but wwinter storms are here and theres no wway wwe can get to the mainland right noww.  
CA: i need you to do me a big fuckin favvor and let nepeta knoww hes ok  
CA: kar  
CA: kar can you do that  
CG: FUCK.  
CG: I HONESTLY AM AT A LOSS FOR WORDS. TAKE A SCREENSHOT, AMPORA. THIS DAY WILL NOT COME AGAIN.  
CG: YOU KEEP SIGNING IN AND OUT. I DON'T KNOW IF YOU'LL GET THIS BUT  
CG: FUCK.  
CG: MESSAGE RECEIVED I GUESS.  
CA: oh holy fuck kar you havve no idea howw glad i am to evven see your shitty grey allcaps  
CA: no tellin howw long this connection's gonna last so  
CA: tell her hes ok and hell be back wwhen the wweather stops fuckin blowwin gigantic leprous fuckin seagoats  
CA: hang on  
CA: he says  
CA: D --> Nepeta, I wish to congratulate you  
CA: D --> I regret I did not make time to do so before setting off on my prototype testing run  
CA: D --> You have my best wishes  
CA: jesus fuck i havve no idea howw he types like that all the fuckin time  
CA: anywway  
CG: ERIDAN, YOU ARE KIND OF FREAKING ME OUT HERE.  
CG: EITHER YOU GUYS ARE HAVING SOME KIND OF INSANE CREEPTASTIC OCEAN THEMED SLEEPOVER OR SOMETHING  
CG: OR THIS IS A REALLY COMPLICATED AND SHITTY ATTEMPT TO PRANK ME.  
CG: EITHER WAY I THINK I ACTUALLY SLIGHTLY GRUDGINGLY ADMIRE YOUR BRAZEN DEFIANCE OF YOUR OWN GODDAMN STUPID HEMOSPECTRUM AND SEADWELLER BULLSHIT.  
CG: THERE MIGHT BE HOPE FOR YOU YET, MY CHILD.  
CA: thanks kar you alwways say the nicest things  
CA: consider this my formal fuck off an die solicitation  
CA: it is mother fuckin engravved an shit  
CA: all elegant up in this bitch

\-- caligulasAquarium has logged off! --

“Shit, we lost the connection.” You sit back in your chair and run your hands through your hair just before you realize this will ruin your gradient-fade-waterfall effect. Goddamn it. “At least we got through to him, he’ll tell Leijon you’re fine.”

Equius is standing beside and slightly behind your chair, a silent presence: he moves now to wrap his arms around himself as if he really is freezing, and he coughs. “You okay?”

“--Yes,” he says, almost startled. “I simply...rather want to thank you for the opportunity to communicate my sentiment, especially after I trespassed on your personal property. It’s appreciated.”

“Whatever,” you say. “You were the one who did your magic whatever to my damn modem. Anyway. It looks like the weather’s gonna ease in the next day or so, but I don’t know if I can teach you to sail in that shitty little excuse for a boat, so I better take you and it back to the mainland myself seeing as how my launch is dead as a respiteblock-entry-gate fastener device.”

You make the logical next step at about the same time he does. “Hey, could you--”

“I could probably--”

And you are absolutely astonished by the smile that suddenly appears on his face like moonlight. It informs his eyes, transforms his whole face, makes him look much more like the age you know he has to be. It is one of the simplest and most honest smiles you have ever fucking seen in your horrible little life. He’s genuinely happy to help you out with your fucked-up engine, happy enough to light up like that, and oh for the sake of all the bottle gods and powder princes you don’t think _anybody_ has ever looked at you quite like that before. With Fef there was always that slight, ignorable edge of her having to _keep an eye_ on you, stop you from doing anything super-extra-stupid, keep your ass in line. Karkat, well, Karkat hates everybody but it’s kind of a pale kind of hatred, he’s smiled at you before but it’s always been a sort of exasperatedly affectionate expression. This, right here, this is the thing and the whole of the thing.

You realize you are probably staring at him and you flush violet and fuss with the splint on your left hand and that makes him come over, oh fuck, he’s _right there_ and he’s still smiling but there’s that crease between his brows and he takes your hand in his so gently and he stops you messing with it. “Does it hurt?”

“What?” you say, in a sort of strangled yelp.

“Your injury. I could adjust the splint if it is causing you discomfort.”

“Oh. No. Um. It’s, it’s, that’s okay.” You sound like a retarded wriggler and you know it. “It’s...It feels fine. Equius. Thank you.”

He doesn’t let you go immediately and you are aware of those so-careful fingertips on your skin and he is, oh fuck, he is now holding your hand in both of his and...

...And he lets go, gets up, and nods to you. “Tell me about your engine.”

It takes you a moment to find your voice and another moment to make sure it will come out in the correct octave once you try to equip it but you do manage, clearing your throat violently and being real fascinated with the middle distance. “Uh. It’s. It’s another KDY thing. Shoulda known better than to buy offplanet, Kuat Drive Yards is a fuckin scam, every tiny replacement part costs six times as much as any generic bullshit and you cannot swap them out because apparently the parts need to be manufactured by magic fuckin elves in some fairyland made a extra money...”

He makes a low rumbly noise and you realize, oh god, it’s a chuckle. “They advertise themselves based on the quality of their engineering, but the other side of that is, as you say, when anything breaks replacement parts cost a moon and a half. However, I can assure you, I have spent enough time with KDY equipment to know where lines can and cannot be fudged. The special airflow sensor, for example, the one that costs a ridiculous amount of money, can be replaced with a standard planetside module if you just remove the extra fairing on one side and plumb it into a two-thirds reduction chamber.”

Your head is spinning. “Okay, okay, I believe you. There’s a whole list of piece-a-shit mechanical things on board that would really benefit from your attention but the launch engine is kinda key. I would...yeah, I’d really appreciate that.”

The silence is sufficiently meaningful for you to stop staring into the distance and look up at him again, and while he is not smiling he is wearing another expression you really do not want to investigate too closely because you have a horrible sinking suspicion it might be pity. “--Your stuff’s probably dry by now,” you say brightly and haul yourself out of the chair-- _fuck_ but you are tired--and abscond to the tiny little utility block off the kitchen where you then have to not pay attention to the fact that you are now folding Equius Zahhak’s clothes for him, and somewhere in there it all gets to be a bit too much.

You are leaning on the dryer and swallowing hard over and over to try and get your throat to stop closing with emotion you do not want and cannot afford and suddenly he is there, he moves so quietly for someone who’s that big, it’s spooky, and one of those careful iron hands is on your shoulder. “Ampora,” he’s saying. “ _Eridan_.”

You don’t think he’s said your given name out loud before, at least you can’t remember it. “Stop, look, okay, _please_ stop, just fuck off, go away--”

He shooshes you. He fucking _shooshes_ you, and you are so tired and so conflicty and your head hurts and your hands hurt and your heart hurts and

and

and you just haven’t got any strength left to resist, and now you are pressing your face against his chest and his arms are around you and you can hear-feel the deep beating of his heart and the rustle-rasp of his breathing, and if there are tears dampening his borrowed shirt you are in no way responsible, you just want that to be known right now.

But your hands creep around him like small dazed skitterbeasts and you feel the angles and shapes of his back, which you’ve hitherto only touched in a completely different context--and when you do, when you do let your fingers trace the planes and curves of muscle, his breath catches sharply beneath your ear and he holds you just a little closer.

Just like that, suddenly, with the shocking abruptness of falling, everything is no longer terrible. In fact when you feel him tuck your head gently under his chin, resting between the lightning-spikes of your horns, nothing seems terrible at all. He has let his hair down, and now it curtains your face too, and you can see why he does that all the time: it is like being safe, in a world where safety is a pleasant fiction.

You think of a line you’ve read somewhere in a novel. Troll Ice-T, maybe. _We have reached the open sea, with some charts, and the firmament._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kuat Drive Yards is the property of whoever actually owns the Star Wars Extended Universe. I love the idea of them banking on KDY Engineering Prowess to sell parts at six times as much as generic to their customers.
> 
> And yes, I yanked the closing quote from Dunnett's _Checkmate_. Anyone who has not read Dorothy Dunnett needs to start right the hell now. I think my earliest awareness of shipping was Lymond/Philippa.
> 
> This is not the end: there will be an epilogue. Thank you, everybody who has read this and commented or left kudos. I very much appreciate your taking the time to read.


	8. sort through all your blurs and stains

“What is this? What... _are_ we?”

“I do not know. I am perhaps predictably not among the planet’s greatest romantic theorists.”

“I just wish I knew what was going _on_.”

“Does it matter so terribly? You’re here. You saved my life; I have just now begun to regard this as a favor rather than an imposition. Eridan....oh, bother, you are going to make me forget myself and use uncouth language if I am not careful...we are stuck here for some little time further due to circumstances beyond our control, and I would like to advance the opinion that the precise nature of what is occurring here in terms of romantic quadrants does no _mmmmph--_ ”

You actually got Equius Zahhak to shut up. This is a major achievement and you mentally award yourself a medal, or you would if you weren’t currently so very involved in exploring the bright sharp edges of his broken teeth with your tongue. In fact, the entire topic of discussion appears to be tabled for the moment because oh, hey, look, he’s doing things to your shirt-buttons like undoing them and one of them cracks in half and he apologizes, and then you seem to forget everything in the universe other than the fact that you can actually make him stop apologizing by kissing him again.

(You may never stop kissing him.)

Shortly afterward you amend that statement to read that _oh fuck how is this even happening how is he so beautiful and you are totally not supposed to be able to do shit like touch him but if nobody tells reality you won’t say a word and just take full and free advantage of the opportunity._

~

You are settled crosslegged like a gnome with really good hair on one of the supports for your launch’s engine, watching your houseguest do arcane things to its innards. “Hand me a three-eighths Gripley,” he rumbles. You try really hard not to pay attention to the fact that that deep rumble _does things_ to you, and just slide your fingertips over the spanners in the open case. There.

Your fingers brush when you set the tool in his hand and you know you are blushing again and you feel ridiculously young but also your chest is tight with an astonishing happiness you have no possible way to describe. “--Tell me what you’re doing?”

Equius looks up from the engine with a quirked eyebrow. He’s in his own clothes again and that had been a little unnerving for you, he looks so much like the distant and bizarre troll you’ve never really spoken to, but his eyes are the same, deep blue and very very steady. “It’s...not very interesting,” he says.

“I don’t care, tell me anyway.” You mean it. You want to know what he’s doing, want to know what those very careful fingertips are moving over. “Cause, you know. I might have to do stuff to the engine myself. Like, in an emergency.”

He rumbles that low chuckle again and your stomach does funny things but you think you don’t actually show this on your face. “Very well. What you have here is an unnecessarily complicated version of the basic two-stroke petro-electric propulsion system. The engine itself does not directly power the propulsion screws, it merely runs a generator which provides power to the screws and your bow thrusters.”

You are trying to follow this. He pauses to cough into his elbow. “Excuse me. --What you’re looking at here is just the generator housing. Your problem is with the combustion module, here, you’ve thrown a timing belt. I can repair it but the fix will not last very long; you need a new belt and it must be installed by a licensed KDY tech, which--”

“--will cost six times as much as necessary,” you finish, sounding like a schoolfeeder’s pet. “Uh. If I got hold of the belt thingy could you put it on?”

“Certainly, although that invalidates six different warranties.” Equius arms sweat from his forehead. Now that he’s on the mend you notice his typical quirks coming back, and you consider this rationally: it’s not, like, actually, all that big a deal. “I would point out that having me work on this thing in the first place invalidates any original equipment warranties that may exist.”

“Yeah, fuck warranties, that thing is two sweeps old and has been nothing but trouble the whole damn time. You can get it running, though?”

“Oh yes. See, the timing belt controls the cycle of combustion, it’s quite simple, as soon as I’ve worked out the ignition timing I can rig a temporary fix that will get us to the mainland.”

He suddenly looks unsure of himself and you realize he’s wondering what will happen when you do get to the mainland. You have no clue. Instead of saying so you just reach down and run a strand of his hair between the fingertips of your good hand. “Swell. I was...I don’t know if this is even a thing that would be advisable but I know the area where you capsized and I can...probably haul up your stuff. From the bottom. It’s not super deep right there.”

Equius does that thing again where a smile breaks like moonrise across his face and all of a sudden he looks like the happiest goddamn troll on the planet. “Really? You’d do that?”

“...Pff. Fuck, of course I’d do it, it’s not a big deal, I know you have a lot invested in that. No guarantee it’ll be any good after sittin in the ocean but I can maybe at least get it back to you.”

“That equipment represents...several perigees’ worth of work,” he says. “To have it restored would be astonishing felicity.”

“You just said ‘astonishing felicity,’ didn’t you?”

“Er. Yes. Why?”

You slither off the engine support and land beside him in an ungainly tangle of black and purple, and you wrap around him and suddenly you are in his lap and his arms encircle you and everything related to internal combustion matters not in the least.

“...kinda love it when you use words like that,” you admit into his shoulder, and the warm deep vibration of his ribcage tells you he’s amused.

~

You have to say he’s bounced back with astonishing rapidity from something that would knock most trolls over for weeks. Apart from the brief sharp fever and the lingering cough he doesn’t seem to have taken much damage at all from his trip to the outskirts of oblivion, and for some reason that makes your heart swell with by-proxy pride. Four nights after you brought him to your hive the two of you set out for the mainland in your now-fully-functional launch, the _Orphaner_ , on an ocean that seems to have given up trying to tie itself in knots with the wind and is content to get on with its business as usual.

You’re wearing your purple-and-black dressing-gown over your dive rig, a thermal suit with big cutouts for your gills and utility loops and belts all over for knives and instruments. Landdwellers wear similar garments when they dare to invade your territory, but they’re limited to the range contained within the bottles of gas they carry; you can swim as long as you have the strength, and this part of the ocean is less polluted, will not leave you sick for nights on end after you work in it.

As you approach the location where his boat capsized he starts to look pinched again, anxious, the same affect as someone who can’t get enough oxygen; you look up at him, worried. “Are you all right?”

He blinks down at you. “I, ah. I was. I...You don’t have to do this, Eridan. Really. It’s not that important.”

“Bullshit it isn’t. Perigees of work, right? Like I said it’s up to chance whether anything is worth the salvage but I can at least haul it up for you.” You put your ungloved hands on his chest, looking up at him; he makes an inarticulate little noise and wraps you up in his arms with that same terrible care. “--Oof. Equius, seriously, what is even the big deal?”

He coughs: you can feel it, and you sigh and press your face against his chest. “You’re worried about this, right? That’s it, you’re worrying about me going down to fetch your stuff. Jesus. I’m a _seadweller_ , this is what I _do_ , Equius, stop being a dork.”

For some reason that seems to do the trick: he nuzzles the top of your head and lets you go. “I have been accused of many things, but dorkhood is a new one. Just as you say, Mr. Ampora, but you will forgive me for some undeniable anxiety.”

“I guess I can handle that. But you better be real sorry for it, you know. All repentant and shit.”

You grin at him, and you feel so light that it seems impossible you’ll even be able to swim down to the ledge where his experimental stuff is lying; but you shrug off the dressing-gown, you step up on the launch’s transom and you execute a fucking _flawless_ dive, and the world is cold and skirling with bubbles and as always there’s that nasty moment where you take your first breath of water and feel your opercula flare. It never stops being nasty, either way: your first breath of water and your first breath of air are both small leaps of faith.

The sensation’s over almost immediately and you swim briskly down to where his shit is all piled up on a rock ledge. Not too bad. There’s some kind of console which you bet is permanently ruined and some bits and pieces of cable and connector, and what looks like a...a fish-shaped robot prototype?

It’s chilly down here and you don’t want him to worry, so you just start hauling it back up to the surface. He takes the pieces without comment or apparent effort, lifting them on board as if they weigh nothing in air the way they weigh nothing in water. After half an hour you think you’ve found all there is to find, and you surface again, coughing out the last of the water in your gills, hair like violet-black anemone-tentacles plastered to your face, and say a few bad words as you push it back.

He’s looking at you funny. 

“What?” you demand, as you climb back on board and reach for a towel. “You’re staring.”

Equius blushes ultramarine and looks away, and _fuck_ but that’s adorable and if you weren’t freezing cold and soaking wet you would wrap around him right now and try to winkle out answers without embarrassing him further; as it is you just towel off your hair and scrub your hands through it, and you know it’s a huge tangly wreck, and he’s...he’s looking at you with an awful, heartbreaking tenderness.

“...Your hair is a mess,” he says, finally, and it sounds like the tenderest sweet nothing ever murmured in a concupiscent ear.

You snort, amused but also helplessly touched, and are even more helplessly touched when he reaches out to smooth your extremely unruly locks with his fingertips. “May I?”

“Heck yes you may,” you say, smiling up at him, “but let me get out of these wet things and into something suitable for lounging, mm?”

You are rewarded with another deep blue blush. Does he know how that makes him look, you wonder, and decide not to tell him, keeping it as a small lovely secret of your own. You saunter past him, dripping, and in your cabin you peel off the thermal suit and towel off vigorously before selecting tight trousers and another floppy gamblignant shirt--and, what the hell, why not, the tall boots that go with it.

Fuck yes. You feel like a conqueror.

Back on deck Equius is fussing over his recovered equipment, muttering under his breath and dabbing at various consoles with a handkerchief. You lean against the companionway hatch and wait for him to notice you, and the flush-and-fade of blood in his cheeks when he does is more than enough reward.

“Eridan,” he says, and you put your finger to your lips.

“Hush. I am going to instruct you in the secret and arcane ways of the hair product,” you tell him. “Come with me. Where we’re going we’ll need mirrors.”

~

Two hours later you are rounding the cape into Eclipse Bay and you can tell you are expected; through your spyglass (of course you have a spyglass) you can make out a tiny green-and-blue speck bouncing up and down on the jetty beside a truculent-looking grey one. “You’ve got a welcoming committee,” you tell Equius. “Um. Leijon and Vantas.”

Equius does that hunching thing again and you say some naughty words and slap the spyglass closed and come over to take his face between your hands. (His hair is shinier than ever at the moment and very well-behaved under the influence of Troll Kerastase Serum Oleo-Relax. It also smells amazing.) “Listen,” you say. “No, really, listen, look at me. I know it’s tough, I do, I know, it’s hard and nobody understands but Equius, you are _not_ alone. Okay? They’ve got their thing going on but you....you have your own. Thing. Going on. If you want it to, I mean.”

Fuck, that got away from you. You try and reparse the sentence. “What I mean is I...you...if...if you want....”

“I do want,” he says, and he takes your face between his hands so gently and he bends to kiss you, and you are so flushed for Equius Zahhak you think you might possibly die of it, and that you wouldn’t mind. “I do. I...have to go back to my hive and sort things out and see what this wretched seawater exposure has done to my machines, knowing what it did to my person--” he coughs, possibly on purpose--”but I confess I cannot relish the thought of spending the near future anywhere other than in your company. I know it’s inconvenient and of course it’s entirely up to you if--”

“Equius?” you say.

“Yes?”

“Shut up.”

~

It’s not as if it’s difficult, making the trip to and from the mainland. Besides, he needs to replace your launch’s timing belt, so when that’s done you might as well take him back to the _Dualscar_ and make him dinner and if one thing leads to another that is entirely beyond your control. Similarly when you come to visit him bringing the latest results from the experimental arrays he has set out around your hive it is quite convenient for him to make _you_ dinner and then, well, you think you sort of like spending half your time on land, really.

Vantas gives you shit online, but if you minded that you’d’ve fed yourself to Feferi’s lusus sweeps ago. And you think there’s a sort of grudging admiration under the invective. You aren’t entirely sure you don’t return it.

You are Eridan Ampora, and you think you might be able to see the edges of what other people define as _peace_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There, that's a better ending. 
> 
> Thank you, everyone who's read this, and everyone who's taken the time to comment or leave kudos. I really didn't have any idea where this fic was going to go when I began it, and I don't know that I'd have continued were it not for encouraging responses, etcetera, etcetera. 
> 
> This isn't over. I have plans for these gentlemen, and for a great many other people in this world.


End file.
